Silly Girls In Dresses

I adore local. I do. Really. If you’re a local business, I will buy your product over a national chain’s product, even if it costs more. My unreachable utopian ideal is one in which all businesses are “local” and globalization is a nightmare that had disappeared into the black hole of history. 

I also love beer. The next time in my life where I have “free time” (now I spend my so-called free time in the law library doing research….), I am going to do two things: 1) learn how to play the guitar really really well and 2) become a beer conoisseur. Every poser and wannabe on earth wants to learn about wine. Screw that….beer is the drink of the people!

And thanks to this article, I know exactly where to start….right here in Brooklyn.

Check this out.

I think my favorite is number 29…or 42…

is awesome.

Interestingly enough, I was just talking with someone about how no one is saying why it would matter if Obama was a Muslim. Perhaps we were too cynical, because I think we came to the conclusion that no one would ever bring up that point. Mr. Powell, you have proved me wrong.

Just watch the entire thing….and get ready for a surprise ending…

About a week ago I said to one of my friends…what the hell happened to Eminem? Remember him? He was good! Where is he?!

Well…..here he is!

Larry Lessig has done it again: another passionate call to arms. Perpetrators of the “Copyright Wars”, beware!

Read the article here.

Honestly, I love everything Larry has ever written. I think he is brilliant, and I think he’s got his finger on exactly what is wrong with copyright law today. Unfortunately, I don’t agree with all of his solutions. Most of the ones he talks about in this article make sense (cause…they are….common sensical? is that a word?), but this one kinda gets me a little bit:

Deregulate Amateur Remix: Basically, if an “amateur” makes a remix, he should not be charged. However, if he puts it on YouTube, he should be charged. Larry analogizes this to the way community playhouses need to pay for licensing plays. I see a few problems. First, how are we ever going to figure out what an “amateur” is? What if one day you are an amateur, and then you progress as an artist and grow and grow until poof! You are a professional! Then, all of a sudden, you have to pay some unknown amount of money? For doing the same thing? Second, the great thing about YouTube is that it is FREE. It’s not like a community playhouse…its like a school talent show. When my friends and I did that dance to “Barbie Girl” in 5th grade (just a hypothetical, obviously), we didn’t need to get a license from Aqua and we sure as hell didn’t need to get a license from Mattel. 

Ug, I don’t know. I mean, the only reason I write in this damn blog anyway is to work all this crap out in my head. 

Larry’s book Remix comes out tomorrow. I. am. so. psyched.

I was at dinner a few months ago with a friend’s friend, and she offered me a piece of her steak.  I politely declined and briefly mentioned why: I’m a vegetarian.

For some reason, whenever I mention this I get “The Look” from people with more normal eating habits. “The Look” basically combines the shock of envisioning a life without delicious meat, and the terror of imagining all the crazy PETA-esque thoughts that must be crawling around my head. First, living without meat is not that bad. I LOVE a good steak, but giving it up was one of the easiest thing I have done. Second, I like animals, but I’m completely for killing and eating them. Of course, I want them treated humanely throughout their life and during their deaths, but really…we’re carnivores. Many animals eat each other. Meat is delicious!

Michael Pollan always manages to remind me why I’m a vegetarian. Mainly, I view it as a form of protest. The way the meat industry operates is abhorrent to morality, and I’d rather refrain from supporting them. Unfortunately for me, the way the agricultural industry  operates is equally abhorrent, but I can’t really give up vegetables as well. So, more than being a vegetarian, I try to buy as much food as possible from local, small-scale farms. 

Here’s the thing: after I turned down the steak from my friend’s friend, I didn’t just get “The Look”. I got the questions too. “Why? How? Are you grossed out if I eat this steak in front of you?” After telling him, basically, “Well, the meat industry is just really bad for our environment and for our political system, so I’d rather not support it,” I got a different kind of look: the blank stare. Apparently, this person had no idea where the food he was eating came from. None. She had never even thought of the connection between the food supply and the environment, and she was utterly baffled at the prospect of a connection existing. She thought that thousands of small cow farmers across the midwest raised cattle cowboy-style, and then sold them to tons of different processing plants, which then just packaged them and put them in McDonalds and 7/11s. It was a disturbing blindness to fact. Even more so, she could not even fathom the connection between farming and politics. How could a guy hoeing fields all day matter to foreign policy or health care reform? The tables were turned, and now I was the one filled with terror at the other’s food choices. 

The thing is, without knowing about what is happening to food I don’t think you can really form an opinion about many of the political issues facing our country. Food is the reason politics exists. Domestication of animals and crops was the catalyst for the social contract. Everything we do, really, is because we need to eat. 

Michael Pollan points this out in a great NYTimes op-ed: find it here. He shows how intimately the health care, energy and environmental crisis are connected with the way we get our food. I really think that being a politically informed citizen includes knowing where your steak comes from. Hopefully, my friend’s friend will have the guts to find out.

I’ve always known that I loved New York, but my first few weeks here were a bit unnerving. After I settled into the routine, and the thrill of being here wore off, I started to notice how dirty the subways were. How trash lined the sidewalks. How the streets seemed to be walls of dingy advertising and flashing logos. After spending years craving this city, New York had become horribly ugly in my eyes.

Thankfully, this only lasted about two weeks. Somehow, the things that I loved about this place slowly began to rise to the surface again. New York is gorgeous in this broken, industrial, grey and hopeful sort of way. 

Philadelphia, however, is actually gorgeous. At least, part of it is. Center City is filled with trees and ornate brownstones and quiet cobblestone streets. There are other parts, though, that will never be beautiful, at least not in the traditional sense. It’s just not possible. North Philadelphia, under the El track, is one of those places. It is a sad place.  

Somehow, though, places like this can be beautiful. Not beautiful in the “aesthetically pleasing” sort of way, and not really beautiful in any way that connotates something “good”….but beautiful in the sense that it makes you feel something bigger. Not good or bad just…you feel like your perception shifts and you can see from more angles than you used to.

This “beauty” is exemplified in Shadow World, a blog by Philadelphia’s David Kessler. I love his short films on North Philadelphia and the world underneath the El train. It’s definitely dark and definitely sad, but sometimes it is…..not. I don’t really know how else to explain! Go watch!

Here is a nice little commentary on some things I discussed in my last post. I kinda wanna see the splatter art they talk about.